Hitler (2 page)

This argument is strengthened by the fact that the personality of Hitler scarcely arouses our interest. Over the years it remains oddly pallid and expressionless, acquiring tension and fascination only in contact with the age. In Hitler there is a great deal of what Walter Benjamin called “social character.” That is, he incorporated all the anxieties, protests, and hopes of the age in his own self to a remarkable degree. But in him all emotions were enormously exaggerated, distorted, and infiltrated with weird features, though never unrelated or incongruent to the historical background. Consequently, Hitler's life would hardly deserve the telling if it were not that extrapersonal tendencies or conditions came to light in it; his biography is essentially part of the biography of the age. And because his life was inextricably linked to his time, it is worth the telling.

Necessarily, then, the background comes more prominently into the fore than is customary in biographies. Hitler must be shown against a dense pattern of objective factors that conditioned, promoted, impelled, and sometimes braked him. The romantic German notion of politics and the peculiarly morose grayness of the Weimar Republic belong equally in this background. So also do the declassing of the nation by the Treaty of Versailles and the secondary social declassing of large sections of the population by the inflation and the world-wide Depression; the weakness of the democratic tradition in Germany; fears of the miscalculations of conservatives who had lost their grip; finally, the widespread fears aroused by the transition from a familiar system to one new and still uncertain. All this was overlaid by the craving to find simple formulas to account for the opaque, intricately involved causes of moroseness, and to flee from all the vexations the age provided into the shelter of an imperious authority.

Hitler as the point of convergence for so many nostalgias, anxieties, and resentments became a historical figure. It is no longer possible to conceive the second quarter of the twentieth century without him. In him an individual once again demonstrated the stupendous power of a solitary person over the historical process. Our account will show to what virulence and potency the many intersecting moods of an age can be brought when demagogic genius, an extraordinary gift for political tactics, and the capacity for that “mysterious coincidence” Burckhardt spoke of, meet in a single person. “History tends at times to become suddenly concentrated in one man, who is then obeyed by the world.”
⁹
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler's rise was made possible only by the unique conjunction of individual with general prerequisites, by the barely decipherable correspondence that the man entered into with the age and the age with the man.

This close connection tends to refute that school of thought which attributes superhuman abilities to Hitler. His career depended not so much on his demonic traits as on his typical, “normal” characteristics. The course of his life reveals the weaknesses and ideological bias of all the theories that represent Hitler as a fundamental antithesis to the age and its people. He was not so much the great contradiction of the age as its mirror image. We will constantly be encountering traces of that correlation.

The signal importance of objective preconditions (which this book attempts to deal with in a series of special “interpolations”) also raises the question of how Hitler particularly affected the course of events. There is no doubt that a movement gathering together all the racist-nationalistic tendencies would have formed during the twenties without the intervention of Hitler's influence and following. But it would very likely have been only one more political grouping within the context of the system. What Hitler conferred upon it was that unique mixture of fantastic vision and consistency which, as we shall see, to a large extent expressed his nature. The radicalism of Gregor Strasser or Goebbels never amounted to more than an infraction of the existing rules of the political game, which underlined the validity of those rules by the very act of challenging them. Hitler's radicalism, on the other hand, annulled all existing assumptions and introduced a novel element into the game. To be sure, the numerous emergencies of the period would have led to crises, but without Hitler they would never have come to those intensifications and explosions that we shall witness. From the first party battle in the summer of 1921 to the last few days of April, 1945, when he expelled Göring and Himmler, Hitler held a wholly unchallenged position; he would not even allow any principle, any doctrine, to hold sway, but only his own dictates. He made history with a highhandedness that even in his own days seemed anachronistic. It is unimaginable that history will ever again be made in quite the same fashion—a succession of private inspirations, filled with surprising coups and veerings, breathtaking perfidies, ideological self-betrayals, but with a tenaciously pursued vision in the background. Something of his singular character, of the subjective element he imposed upon the course of history, emerges in the phrase “Hitler Fascism” favored by Marxist theoreticians in the thirties. In this sense National Socialism has quite rightly been defined as Hitlerism.

But the question remains whether Hitler was not the last politician who could so largely ignore the weight of conditions and interests; whether the coercion of objective factors has not grown visibly stronger, and whether with this the historical possibility of a great doer has not grown ever smaller. For, unquestionably, historical rank is dependent upon the freedom that the person who acts maintains in the face of circumstances. In a secret speech delivered in the early summer of 1939, Hitler declared: “There must be no acceptance of the principle of evading the solution to problems by adjustment to circumstances. Rather, the task is to adjust circumstances to requirements.”
¹⁰
Following this motto, he, the “visionary,” practiced an
imitatio
of the great man; the attempt was boldly carried to the utmost extreme, and ultimately failed. It would appear that such attempts ended with him—just as so much else ended with him.

 

If men do not make history in the way that traditional hero-worshiping literature assumed, or do so to a far smaller extent, Hitler certainly made much more history than many others. But at the same time history made him, to an altogether extraordinary degree. Nothing entered into this “unperson,” as he is defined in one of the following chapters, that was not already present; but whatever did enter acquired a tremendous dynamic. Hitler's biography is the story of an incessant, intensive process of interchange.

We are still asking, however, whether historical greatness can be associated with a hollow individuality. It is challenging to imagine what Hitler's fate would have been had history not produced the circumstances that first awakened him and made him the mouthpiece of millions of defense complexes. It is easy to picture his ignored existence on the fringes of society, to see him embittered and misanthropic, longing for a great destiny and unable to forgive life for having refused him the heroic role he craved. “For the oppressive thing was... the complete lack of attention we found in those days from which I suffered most,” Hitler wrote concerning the period of his entry into politics.
¹¹
The collapse of order, the age's anxieties and climate of change, played into his hands by giving him the chance to emerge from the shadow of anonymity. Great men, in Burckhardt's judgment, are needed specifically in times of terror.
¹²

The phenomenon of Hitler demonstrates, to an extent surpassing all previous experience, that historical greatness can be linked with paltriness on the part of the individual concerned. For considerable periods his personality seemed disintegrated, as if it had evaporated into unreality; and it was this seemingly fictitious character of the man that misled so many conservative politicians and Marxist historians—in curious agreement—to regard Hitler as the instrument for the ends of others. Far from possessing any greatness and any political, let alone historical, stature, he seemed to embody the very type of the “agent,” one who acts for others. But both the conservatives and the Marxists were deceiving themselves. It was actually an ingredient in Hitler's recipe for tactical success that he made political capital out of this mistake, in which class resentment against the petty bourgeois was then, and still is, expressed. His biography includes, among other things, the story of a gradual disillusionment. In his day he excited a good deal of ironic contempt, and that attitude persists, though kept in check by the memory of the toll of lives he took. But it was, and still is, a misreading of his character.

The course of this life, and the pattern of events themselves, will throw light upon the whole matter. Yet here we may well ask ourselves a few pertinent questions. If Hitler had succumbed to an assassination or an accident at the end of 1938, few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest of German statesmen, the consummator of Germany's history. The aggressive speeches and
Mein Kampf,
the anti-Semitism and the design for world dominion, would presumably have fallen into oblivion, dismissed as the man's youthful fantasies, and only occasionally would critics remind an irritated nation of them. Six and one-half years separated Hitler from such renown. Granted, only premature death could have given him that, for by nature he was headed toward destruction and did not make an exception of himself. Can we call him great?

 

 

 

 

The need to magnify themselves, to bestir themselves, is characteristic of all illegitimates.

Jacob Burckhardt

 

All through his life he made the strongest efforts to conceal as well as to glorify his own personality. Hardly any other prominent figure in history so covered his tracks, as far as his personal life was concerned. With a carefulness verging on pedantry, he stylized his persona. The concept he had of himself was more like a monument than like a man. From the start he endeavored to hide behind it. Rigid in expression, early conscious of his calling, at the age of thirty-five he had already withdrawn into the concentrated, frozen inapproachability of the Great Leader. In obscurity legends form; in obscurity the aura of being one of the elect can grow. But that obscurity which cloaks the early history of his life also accounted for the anxieties, the secrecy, and the curiously histrionic character of his existence.

Even as leader of the struggling young NSDAP (National Socialist Workers' Party) he regarded interest in his private life as insulting. As Chancellor he forbade all publicity about it.
¹
The statements of all those who knew him more than casually, from a friend of his youth to the members of his intimate dinner circle, stress how he liked to keep his distance and preserve his privacy. “Throughout his life he had an indescribable aloofness about him.”
²
He spent several years in a “home for men”; but of all the many people who met him there, few could recall him later. He moved about among them as a permanent stranger, attracting no attention. At the beginning of his political career he jealously took care that no pictures of him were published. Some have explained this obsession as the strategy of a bom propagandist; it has been argued that as a man of mystery he deliberately aroused interest in himself.

But even if this is so, his efforts at concealment did not spring entirely from the desire to introduce a note of allure into his portrait. Rather, we have here the anxieties of a constricted nature overwhelmed by a sense of its own ambiguousness. He was forever bent on muddying still further the opaque background of his origins and family. When, in 1942, he was informed that a plaque had been set up for him in the village of Spital, he flew into one of his violent rages. He transformed his ancestors into “poor cottagers.” He falsified his father's occupation, changing him from a customs official to a postal official. He curtly repulsed the relatives who tried to approach him. For a time his younger sister Paula ran his household at Obersalzberg, but he made her take another name. After the invasion of Austria he forbade Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels to publish; he owed some vague, early suggestions to this man, the eccentric exponent of a racist philosophy. Reinhold Hanisch was his onetime chum from his days in the home for men; he had Hanisch murdered. He insisted that he was no one's disciple. All knowledge had come to him from his own inspiration, by the grace of Providence and out of his dialogues with the Spirit. Similarly, he would be no one's son. The picture of his parents emerges in the dimmest of outlines from the autobiographical chapters of his book,
Mein Kampf,
and only to the extent that it supported the legend of his life.

His efforts to muddy the waters were favored by the fact that he came from across the border. Like many of the revolutionaries and conquerors of history, from Alexander to Napoleon to Stalin, he was a foreigner among his countrymen. There is surely a psychological link between this sense of being an outsider and the readiness to employ a whole nation as material for wild and expansive projects, even to the point of destroying the nation. At the turning point of the war, during one of the bloody battles of attrition, when his attention was called to the tremendous losses among newly commissioned officers, he replied with surprised incomprehension: “But that's what the young men are there for.”

But foreignness did not sufficiently conceal him. His feeling for order, rules, and respectability was always at variance with his rather unsavory family history, and evidently he never lost a sense of the distance between his origins and his claims on the world. His own past always stirred his anxieties. In 1930, when rumors arose that his enemies were preparing to throw light on his family background, Hitler appeared very upset: “These people must not be allowed to find out who I am. They must not know where I come from and who my family is.”